I wonder something. We have an rails app that had been translated in 30/40 languages including exotic languages. We wonder what's the best way to handle numbers and number translation.
For example, we have in english, a string 3 items, but in persian or arabic, it will become something like ٣ سلع. Unfortunately, I am getting 3 سلع using I18n gem.
I am using this file as locale:
https://raw.github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/master/rails/locale/ar.yml
The locale is correclty set to ar it just output 3 in place of ٣ (the arabic/persian character)
Any ideas?
Related
I use Symfony 5, and I checked Arabic like the default language of the website.
but when I write a number on the database and get it, the Symfony translate it automatically to Arabic numbers ( from [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] to [١,٢,٣,٤,٥,٦,٧,٨,٩] ).
is there any solution to use modern numbers in place of Arabic numbers ?
After a lot of searches and analyzing I found that issue come from the NumberType input, so I changed to the TextType input
I need to handle Declensions. The app is in different language(Czech), where the words changes for singular or plural. and based on genders as well.
Example in English
1 item, 2 items, 5 items, ...
In target language => Czech Language
1 položka, 2 položky, 5 položek, ...
I have found few repositories that I am currently going through.
https://github.com/adamelliot/Inflections
https://github.com/mattt/InflectorKit
On android, there is a way to do it via xml. Is there any recommended way to handle this on iOS ? I don't want to use if's or switches.
Thank you for and suggestions.
Matti
In iOS (and other Apple platforms), plural declensions and other localized strings that change along with numeric values run through the same API as other localized strings. So you just call NSLocalizedString in your code (no extra ifs or switches), but you provide more supporting localized data — in addition to the Localizable.strings file that contains the main (number-independent) localized strings, you add a stringsdict file for the declensions.
Apple's docs run through this step-by-step: see Handling Noun Plurals and Units of Measurement in their Internationalization and Localization Guide. The example there is Russian, which IIUC has similar plural rules to Czech... but the stringsdict format supports the full set of Unicode CLDR Plural Rules if you need to handle more.
I am using Ruby on Rails 4 and, given a number, I would like to display the internationalization "second"/"seconds" string for that number. That is, I have a number (for example, 1 or 20) and I would like to display 1 second or 20 seconds (in english).
I know the date helpers but no method seems to fit for my case. How can I make that?
The usual t function eventually ends up inside the i18n gem's translate method. translate, like any sensible i18n/l10n tool, already knows about the current locale's pluralization rules. That means that you should just tell the translation system which message/string you want to how many of them you have, something like:
t('message-identifier', :count => n)
Then t will use the appropriate pluralization rules for n things in the current locale.
I use gettext for all my translation needs and it behaves this way. But there's no possible way that t wouldn't work this way too; it must work this way or it is utterly useless.
I've been happily using the built-in rails i18n support for translating strings to different languages, which works great. Recently though I've had a need for something that goes a bit beyond the default behaviour of this gem.
I'll call this "inverse translation" for lack of a better word. Basically the idea is that I have some string in some language, and I want to be able to call a method with another locale, and get back the string translated to that locale if a mapping exists in the locale strings.
For example, assume I have in config/locales/en.yml
en:
hello: Hello World!
and in config/locales/ja.yml:
ja:
hello: Konnichi wa!
then when I call this method l2l_translate ("locale to locale translate") while in the English locale, with the string and the locale as arguments, I get back the Japanese translation:
I18n.locale = :en
l2l_translate("Hello World!", :ja) #=> "Konnichi wa!"
Also, and this is more tricky, I want to be able to inverse match interpolated strings. So say I have:
config/locales/en.yml
en:
minutes: "%d minutes"
config/locales/ja.yml
ja:
minutes: "%d分"
Then I should be able to translate from English to Japanese like so:
l2l_translate("5 minutes", :ja) #=> "5分"
So basically the string should be matched with a regex to the English translation string, and the "5" pulled out and sent as an argument "%d" to the Japanese translation.
Obviously there are potential problems here, if: 1) there is no match, or 2) there are multiple matches. Those could be handled by raising an exception, for example, or by returning nil in the former case and an array of translations in the latter. In any case those are minor points.
My basic question is: does anything like this exist? And if not, does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about developing it (say as a gem)?
The application I'm specifically thinking of is an API wrapper for a service in Japanese. I want to be able to specify patterns in Japanese which can be matched and translated into other languages. The default i18n support won't do this, and I don't know of any other gems that will.
Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated! For reference see also this discussion in 2010 on the topic of inverse translation with i18n-rails.
We use gettext, which is a standard unix i18n solution. For Rails, you can use gettext_i18n_rails. One caveat is that FastGettext, which gettext_i18n_rails is backed by, doesn't seem to have complete gettext support, and some advanced features such as pluralization didn't work as expected.
Our application is being translated into a number of languages, and we need to have a combo box that lists the possible languages. We'd like to use the name of the language in that language (e.g. Français for French).
Is there any "proper" order for listing these languages? Do we alphabetize them based on their English names?
Update:
Here is my current list (I want to explore the Unicode Collating Algorithm that Brian Campbell mentioned):
"العربية",
"中文",
"Nederlands",
"English",
"Français",
"Deutsch",
"日本語",
"한국어",
"Polski",
"Русский язык",
"Español",
"ภาษาไทย"
Update 2: Here is the list generated by the ICU Demonstration tool, sorting for an en-US locale.
Deutsch
English
Español
Français
Nederlands
Polski
Русский язык
العربية
ภาษาไทย
한국어
中文
日本語
This is a tough question without a single, easy answer. First of all, by default you should use the user's preferred language, as given to you by the operating system, if that is one of your available languages (for example, in Windows, you would use GetUserPreferredUILanguages, and find the first one on that list that you have a translation for).
If the user still needs to select a language (you would like them to be able to override their default language, or select another language if you don't support their preferred language), then you'll need to worry about how to sort the languages. If you have 5 or 10 languages, the order probably doesn't matter that much; you might go for sorting them in alphabetical order. For a longer list, I'd put your most common languages at the top, and perhaps the users preferred languages at the top as well, and then sort the rest in alphabetical order after that.
Of course, this brings up how to sort alphabetically when languages might be written in different scripts. For instance, how does Ελληνικά (Ellinika, Greek) compare to 日本語 (Nihongo, Japanese)? There are a few possible solutions. You could sort each script together, with, for instance, Roman based scripts coming first, followed by Cyrillic, Greek, Han, Hangul, and so on. Or you could sort non-Roman scripts by their English name, or by a Roman transliteration of their native name. Probably the first or third solution should be preferred; people may not know the English name for their language, but many languages have English transliterations that people may know about. The first solution (each script sorted separately) is how the Mac OS X languages selection works; the second (sorted by their Roman transliteration) appears to be how Wikipedia sorts languages.
I don't believe that there is a standard for this particular usage, though there is the Unicode Collation Algorithm which is probably the most common standard for sorting text in mixed scripts in a relatively language-neutral way.
I would say it depends on the length of your list.
If you have 5 languages (or any number which easily fits into the dropdown without scrolling) then I'd say put your most common language at the top and then alphabetize them... but just alphabetizing them wouldn't make it less user friendly IMHO.
If you have enough the you'd need to scroll I would put your top 3 or 5 (or some appropriate number of) most common languages at the top and bold them in the list then alphabetize the rest of the options.
For a long list I would probably list common languages twice.
That is, "English" would appear at the top of the list and at the point in the alphabetized list where you'd expect.
EDIT: I think you would still want to alphabetize them according so how they're listed... that is "Espanol" would appear in the E's, not in the S's as if it were "Spanish"
Users will be able to pick up on the fact that languages are listed according to their translated name.
EDIT2: Now that you've edited to show the languages you're interested in I can see how a sort routine would be a bit more challenging!
The ISO has codes for languages (here's the Library of Congress description), which are offered in order by the code, by the English name, and by the French name.
It's tricky. I think as a user I would expect any list to be ordered based on how the items are represented in the list. So as much as possible, I would use alphabetical order based on the names you are actually displaying.
Now, you can't always do that, as many will use other alphabets. In those cases there may be a roman-alphabet way of transliterating the name (for example, the Pinyin system for Mandarin Chinese) and it could make sense to alphabetize based on that. However, romanization isn't a simple subject; there are at least a dozen ways for romanizing Arabic, for example.
You could alphabetize them based on their ISO 639 language code.